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As part of our new initiative on TPF you can come and take part in a series of new in-depth articles and discussions every month. Featured this month are the methods that one of our top avian photographers, Kristofer Rowe uses to get his stunning photos (as also featured on Tamron USA website as well!). So drop in and take part, I know that Kristofer will be happy to answer your questions and hear what you do out in the field with your camera!

I'm looking to buy a photo editing program that is pretty easy to use. My 14 year old daughter loves "playing" with her photo's and really enjoyed her 1 year subscription to Picnik. But I'm looking for something for myself that would be a bit more of a real editing software, yet still easy enough for her to use! Any suggestions?

Lightroom is a developing and cataloging program. It's not EDITING in the sense your daughter will be wanting. There are no layers, no fonts. no pixel editing.
I'd suggest Adobe PhotoShop Elements 10 first and second would be whatever the current version of Corel's PaintShop ProPhoto X3 (or whatever number we are on)

Lightroom is a developing and cataloging program. It's not EDITING in the sense your daughter will be wanting. There are no layers, no fonts. no pixel editing.
I'd suggest Adobe PhotoShop Elements 10 first and second would be whatever the current version of Corel's PaintShop ProPhoto X3 (or whatever number we are on)

Try Photoscape before buying, It is very good and has a lot of slick tools.

Click to expand...

I think you will find that Photoscape is a free download software, and you're right, it has a lot of nifty little editing features and a good viewer included...
Faststone is also a good viewer with some good editing software, plus it's free to home users...

Have you tried the cd that came with your camera? It is a good place to start and is free. Also, I am a huge fan of this photographer in Utah. Looking forward to learning a lot from her in 2012. She's got an awesome give away for those of you who are photographers. Find her on Facebook or Crave Photography » Blog. Could win a new 85mm lens, Nikon or Canon. Sa-weet! She can teach you editing as well.

[h=6]have you tried the cd editing software that comes with your camera? it's a good, free, place to start. Also, there are photographers that teach editing. I'm a huge fan of this photographer in Utah. Looking forward to learning a lot from her in 2012. She's got an awesome give away too. Find her on Facebook or Crave Photography » Blog. Could win a new 85mm lens, Nikon or Canon. Sa-weet![/h]

Elements can do some of the things CS5 and Lightroom 3 can, but a whole lot less than "almost everything".

Lightroom 3's Develope module, and CS5's Camera Raw use the same edit rendering engine ACR 6. Elements 9, and 10's Camera Raw use a very defeatured version of ACR 6 (having about 1/2 the same capabilites as Lightroom, CS5 Camera Raw).

Elements 10 has about 30% of the tools, functions, features, and capablities CS5 has, and CS6/ACR 7 is due soon (May/April).

As already suggested, Adobe Photoshop Elements would be a good option. It&#8217;s relatively easy to use and has a lot of potential. I&#8217;m sure you would benefit from it as much as your daughter.

If you&#8217;re thinking about taking image editing more seriously, you could also go with the full Photoshop software. There are several good reasons for that.

Because it&#8217;s the most popular graphic software on the market, you will be able to find numerous guides and tutorials, what in result will allow you and your daughter to learn faster and solve any problems you encounter.

There are plenty of free brushes, textures or shapes available for download, which can not only increase your productivity, but also allow your daughter to have a lot of fun playing with them. Installation of new brushes is as easy as taking a candy from a baby.

The potential of Photoshop is amazing. You can create or edit all sorts of graphics, re-touch your photos, make animations and even create website layouts.

If you&#8217;re considering printing your images, Photoshop is great for colour management, and it will help you obtain quality prints with accurate colours. Of course, for that you would need a calibrated screen and colour profiles for your printer.

Photoshop, in comparison with other graphic software, is used by a significant number of designers, photographers and companies. If your daughter learns it now, I can guarantee you that she will find it useful in the future.

Finally, I don&#8217;t think Photoshop is more difficult to use than other graphic programs. It has quite a lot of options, however everything is logically organised and intuitional in use. You can start with a very simple program, but at some point you will end up using Photoshop anyway.

I&#8217;d say it&#8217;s better to start directly with Photoshop as both of you will find it very beneficial now and in the future. You can download a free trial and test it for 30 days. As I said, follow some basic tutorials and you will notice that it&#8217;s not as difficult as it may seem!

The easiest? I disagree about Elements, it's just a subset of Photoshop and once past the quick tab it gets complicated fast. If a Mac it is a no brainer IMO look at a iPhoto, snapseed and a host of other iPad ports. All are Simple, fun and do a very good job. I would go so far as to say get an iPad and use those apps to edit. Some of the things you can do are very cool and a great deal of experimentation is possible. Most of all is have fun it is one thing to be editing, post processing and such as part of your job and another as a amateur